While it isn't 100% clear what sort of development you do (I assume nothing/little windows specific as you didn't mention Visual Studio "proper"), but I would s

While it isn't 100% clear what sort of development you do (I assume nothing/little windows specific as you didn't mention Visual Studio "proper"), but I would suggest it's an entirely reasonable thing to do. My only real advice would be hardware-wise, get as much memory as you can practically afford. The internal SSD can be augmented with a TB3 or USB-C external with equivalent speeds and/or lower speeds for greater GB/$ ratio, but the memory you buy it with is the memory it will die with. I used a 2011 MBP as my main/sole machine almost every day for close to 7 years, in no small part due to an aftermarket upgrade to max out the memory at 16GB.